Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide by Bryan Crable (2012)

Ralph Ellison, one of the greatest American authors and of particular interest to fans of blues and jazz, often stated his indebtedness to the theories and sometimes the conclusions to his contemporary, the writer, philosopher and communication researcher Kenneth Burke.

The two essential authors of the 1940s (and of the decades to come) shared a lot of agreement, puzzlement, and even some anger in their view of the current state of black-and-white relations in the U.S. of their time.

Maybe you wonder why a book on “race” or communication is reviewed here, on a website mostly occupied with jazz and jazz-related studies and essays. What would this topic have to do with jazz? Well, the answer is easy: everything. Blues and jazz, as well as many other artistic African-American expressions are the result of this “racial divide.”

There is a large body of correspondence between them, and as much as they seemed to have agreed on the unsatisfactory and catastrophic state of race relations due to ignorance, prejudice, legal inequality and a domestic history of hatred in the U.S., they never came to a complete understanding of each other.
This is due to a number of factors, as their correspondence (some of it previously unpublished) in the present book reveals; one major reason, however, may have been Burke’s uneasiness with the term “race” in a direct dialog.
But this is not immediately perceivable, since the philosopher’s work covered a multitude of different topics such as technology, sociology, human action and ecology; what made his research, and his concepts of perception and communication stand out from the philosophers of his time was the inclusion of “race relations” in the U.S.

Why then, would the dialog with a tantamount writer of fiction (his masterpiece Invisible Man awarded with the National Book Award in 1953), brilliant essays (Shadow and Act, to me a milestone in writing on jazz and the arts) and for many still the best writer on jazz and African-American aesthetics be so difficult?

Bryan Crable, Professor of Communication at Villanova University, Founding Director of the Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society, tries to put a finger on this question; he is also an expert on all things related to Kenneth Burke. Fortunately, Crable does not come up with the perfect answer, since he discovers at the root of the difficult communication many problematic features described and even coined by Burke.
One possible explanation then is “antagonist cooperation,” a Burkean term for the necessity of creative solutions and alterations of both perception and action. Burke’s main theoretical framework (Philosophy of Literary Form, A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives) gravely influenced Ellison. Consequently both men shared a huge body of similar opinions, and hence they could reach agreement on most levels; however, it was the very nature of their background and their experience which kept them separated. And each one developed an individual set of theories of communication: while one used the symbol and symbolic action (either fictional or real), the other one developed a system of artistic creation, improvisation and reinterpretation.

Since this must remain a review confined to a certain shortness, I recommend this title to any scholar of either Burke or Ellison for profound study. Their main works and conclusions may have been developed more than half a century ago and now be replaced by new ideas, but many of Burke’s “symbolic actions” or Ellison’s concepts of (African American) artistic creation are still valid and kicking.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert

Bryan Crable. Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide (American Literatures Initiative). University Press of Virginia, 2012, 264 pages.